.comment: The Wit and Wisdom of Linus Torvalds - page 3

Glimpses of a Guy You'd Like to Know

January 31, 2001

By
Dennis E. Powell

[On some PCMCIA cardbus
implementations] Who makes those pieces of crap? And who buys
them? I can understand it in embedded stuff simply because the chips
are simpler and smaller, but in a laptop you should definitely try to
avoid it.

ANYBODY who does driver development
without taking the real world into account is a dangerous person. Stacks
of papers, diagrams and rules are absolutely WORTHLESS if you can't
just understand the fact that documentation is nothing more than a
guideline.

Once you realize that documentation
should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in
general, THEN, and only then, have you reached the level where you
can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.

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If you have 512MB or RAM, you can
probably afford another 40GB or so of harddisk. They are disgustingly
cheap these days.

I'm not worried about a certain class
of features. I will predict, for example, that disk subsystems etc
will continue to get smarter, to the point where most people will end
up just buying a "file server" whenever they buy a disk.
THOSE kinds of features are the obvious ones when you have devices
that get smarter, and the kinds of features people are willing to pay for.

The things I find really doubtful is
that somebody would be so silly as to make the low-level electrical
protocol be anything but a simple direct point-to-point link. Shared
buses just do not scale, and they also have some major problems with
true high-performance GBps bandwidth. . . .

Just wait. My crystal ball is
infallible.

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Also, can people who have had unhappy
relationships with their eepro100 please try to cuddle and make up
again?